The Lamp with Wings: love sonnets by M.A. Vizsolyi

The Lamp with Wings
love sonnets
by M.A. Vizsolyi


Harper Perennial
New York, NY
Copyright © 2011 by M.A. Vizsolyi
ISBN: 978-0-06-206901-6
Softbound, 63 pages, $13.99

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

This book was selected as one of the 2010 National Poetry Series winners, the one selected by poet Ilya Kaminsky and it presents to us the love sonnet in a way that
Galileo or Copernicus presented the solar system to an unprepared world.

When we think of love sonnets we immediately focus on Shakespeare, but Vizsolyi writes love sonnets the way Shakespeare could never have imagined. Perhaps the way J.S. Bach could not have imagined Philip Glass, though connections between the two composers can be hear, the line from one poet to the other can be read.

[hello little one I no longer glue] is one example:

hello little one I no longer glue
the starfish together with direct &
understandable sadness if you want that
go to mcdonald’s where the
romantics supersize everything
everything
if you want the flower which will
walk with you & bear your pain
I recommend angela’s on 3rd she has
such nice flowers there the daffodils
are in & narcissus will barely
raise his head to meet you such
a beautiful girl if I gave you the
heavens you’d tear down the roof such
a beautiful girl if I gave you sea
stars you’d skip them like stones

Love sonnet you say? Absolutely and Vizsolyi notes at the end of the book that the spirit of his wife, Margarita Delcheva’s spirit dances through every poem. So it does. You will find many references to her – without name. For example:

when we find it in the river
without realizing its weight
& you will look at me & I at you
from:[in the heart of pennsylvania there]

Or from [I imagine the knocking of your hooves]

about the cat with a wooden leg who
ran out of the house to save
your life the seventh knock on
the wall was hers the dead are not lonely

What makes Vizsolyi’s love sonnets compelling is a combination of sight and sound. The poems have no punctuation so whether you read them silently, or out loud, you provide the stops and starts. There is also a one & one-half line spacing which also affects your reading and, course no capital letters, only an occasional apostrophe will do for him. Then add the bracketed titles which are always the first line of the sonnet, unexpected language, images, metaphors, and you a poem which shakes you to the core of what you think a sonnet is supposed to be. Forget Petrarch, Shakespeare, or other sonnet writers who you have read in the classical mode. Instead, experience Vizsolyi as you might any writer who has creativity and the willingness to put it out there for readers to absorb.

Kaminsky says, “This book will knock your socks off. This is real poetry.” I agree.

Somerville Bagel Bard Zvi Sesling gets Poet Laureate for Brookline

I am a lover of irony. It seems that a Somerville Bagel Bard Zvi A. Sesling( Who resides in Brookline) lobbied and spurred the city on to have a Brookline Poet Laureate. I told him about the lack of interest in our beloved burg and it inspired him to get one for his town...they finally saw the light. The light in Somerville is still way, way at the end of the tunnel...sadly. Here is an article by Sesling about how he did it...




Somerville Bagel Bard Zvi Sesling gets Poet Laureate for Brookline



Back in June 2008 I brought a proposal to the Brookline Board of Selectmen requesting they create a position of Poet Laureate for the Town of Brookline. I suggested the Brookline Council on the Arts, together with a citizen or two and a Selectman take applications, filter them and select one person for a two year term.

I thought the idea was a “no brainer.” I thought, despite the many difficult issues they had to deal with, they would, among their more trivial issues find a few minutes to approve the concept.

However, I guessed wrong. Perhaps they did not know or understand the wisdom, joy and education poetry imparts to readers. I had already explained to them that the cities of Boston and Cambridge have Poet Laureates as does the State of New Hampshire, where the legislature, in the middle of pressing issues of the economy, gay marriage and taxes still found the time to appoint a Poet Laureate.

Yet, Town of Brookline Board of Selectmen could not find even five minutes in one
year of meetings to take an action and could only benefit the town. I wrote letters to the local paper, asked four of the five Selectmen for help and got no where. One Selectman promised my wife to do something and then would not return phone calls.

Then, last year when I went to the polls to vote in a local election, I was telling Selectman Ken Goldstein about the idea and my frustration with the Board. He was in the second year of his first term and he said he would undertake the project. A few months later he and I appeared before the Brookline Council on the Arts with the proposal. The Council then undertook the project and did months of study, including looking into the Boston Poet Laureate contract. They moved forward, meeting, creating a contract and finally having Town Counsel (Brookline’s in house lawyer) review it. Selectman Goldstein and the Council on the Arts then brought it to the Selectmen who voted unanimously to approve the position for an initial two year period with a stipend of $1,000. Two banks, Bay State Federal Savings and Century Bank each contributed $500 to fund the position.

In his presentation Selectman Goldstein even read a poem from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Julia Ward Howe which included a reference to Brookline.

The lesson I learned from all this is that it takes a committed city/town official, one who appreciates and supports the arts, who makes commitments and keeps them.

I know that Doug Holder has been trying to get the Somerville City Council to approve a Poet Laureate for the city – and there are some many wonderful poets in Somerville, many of whom, known as the Bagel Bards – meet weekly at the Au Bon Pain in Davis Square.

Perhaps there is a City Councilor out there who will take up the issue and see it to fruition the way Ken Goldstein has done in Brookline.

Ghazal-Mazal By Linda Zisquit

Ghazal-Mazal

By Linda Zisquit

Finishing Line Press

Georgetown, Kentucky

ISBN: 978-1-59924-914-8

28 Pages

$12.00



Reviewed by Dennis Daly



Poet Linda Zisquit in her twenty-eight page chapbook, Ghazal-Mazal, stretches the usually strict and demanding poetic form of ghazal into a playful set of variations—etudes really—that highlight this kind of poem’s potential in the English language.

Ghazal is an Arabic word that traditionally describes a type of love poem written in Persian, Arabic, or Urdu. It is also used in Uzbek by the legendary fifteenth century poet, Alisher Navoiy. Most ghazals consist of between ten to thirty lines combined in couplets. The first two lines end in the same word or phrase and there is a penultimate rhyme before that word or phrase. This end refrain is then repeated in the second line of each couplet. The couplets exit almost independently in the purer versions. And finally the last couplet is a signature couplet bringing the poem’s authorship in some fashion to the foreground.

In Ghazal: Routine Zisquit both intellectualizes the concept of routine and orders up some stunning images which brings it home. Like most young lovers she rebels against routine. She says,



…I scoffed routine



and while it was offered each stark morning

as I woke next to a graceful man of deep routine



I saw instead the gray offal of old snow

and the Buffalo dread embedded with routine.



Next the poet comes to an understanding of her own routines, which she has picked up from her mother,



my mother’s skin freckled at the public beach,

the way she shifted weight from leg to leg, a routine



I’ve taken on as I wait for the bathwater

to heat and in that movement mimic her routine.



Then the poem takes a surprising turn as the poet realizes the power for good that a routine possesses:



like a boat or barge on the water

that lifts mysteriously, moving rhythmically, in routine



and I, shot-sighted, dismissed its force

its holding power: the tension inherent in routine.



In Ghazal: Ache, Zisquit discusses the penultimate rhyme scheme that she doesn’t always use, and does it by using that rhyme scheme, albeit a bit flawed. She’s does this very well. Here’s a taste:



But the continuing line the couplet

with its penultimate rhyme, more ache



then comfort, especially when you break

the pattern at the start, core ache.



It doesn’t have to be the same each day

you can stare at the page, or go for ache.



Ghazal: Illicit Love matches form and reality with interesting consequences. The ghazel form itself becomes a metaphor,



The night I found you I found the form

for the poems already written! Illicit love



is meant for couplets disconnected

and a refrain at the end repeated: illicit love.



The poet speaks of form becoming essence,



… But illicit love



continued, or more accurately began

as vagrant habits ended. Illicit love



became the essence of my matter,

the single spark to light the fire …



And finally,



…illicit love’s



a filler that, once finished, reveals an empty vessel.

Now I search for subject without illicit love…



Ghazal: Havoc is an angry but deeply touching poem. It seems to be a love poem with mixed feelings about the sometimes- destructive nature of love. The unease with loss of control is telling,



All it takes is for you to appear and—havoc.

My heart, my house, nothing resumes its place, all havoc.



Why is it that your swagger, your foolish happiness

Is my undoing, and I cannot eat or sleep, havoc.



Another poem, which uses the ghazal form as a metaphor is Ghazal: Your Flaws. The poet argues through her poetic images that life’s flaws can be turned into virtues with a dose of awareness,



..your ghazals lack penultimate

rhymes, not to mention disjunctive couplets. For flaws



you are replete. You enjamb the lines as if the form

propelled you. Or unexacting, you respect your flaws.



The poet is literally playing with rhetoric through images and she is good at it.

Zisquit also includes seven non-ghazals in this collection. My favorite is Song for Robert Creeley because of this lovely image,



Early morning wetness

And this emptiness

Not of objects missing

Or someone gone—



As if a light rain

Cleared away dust

And the solemn desire

To embrace what’s at hand



Came shining…



This collection of Zisquit’s work may seem small, but the artistry herein speaks volumes.

Linda Larson: A Poet Who Writes What She Loves and Loves What She Writes.

Linda Larson: A Poet Who Writes What She Loves and Loves What She Writes.

Interview with Doug Holder

Linda Larson has been a journalist, poet, writing teacher, and a writing student in the course of her career. One thing she likes about the role of a poet is that she gets to write about what she loves. And it is evident in her body of work that she has a deep love for her subjects and the craft of writing.

Linda Larson was born and educated in the Midwest, and spent many a childhood summer in Mississippi. She graduated with an M.A. from the Writing Seminars at John Hopkins University in 1970. While in Mississippi she worked as a feature writer for the Capitol Reporterr and The Jackson Advocate. She relocated to the Boston area and for five years she served as an editor and contributor to Spare Change News-- a homeless paper based in Cambridge. In 2007, she published her first book of poetry Washing the Stones ( Ibbetson Street Press).

I talked with Larson on my Somerville Community Access TV Show: Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.

Doug Holder: So you were a reporter for a couple of newspapers down South. Did your experience as a journalist prepare you for poetry?

Linda Larson: Like with poetry, when you are a journalist you try to find something to write about that is of interest to you--what matters to you. When you write a story--like a poem--you want to start with a gripping image. Basically my poems are stories. I learned how to tell a good story as a reporter.

One thing about poetry is that you get to write about what you love, not about what you are assigned--and that is how it all begins...

DH: The noted critic Irene Koronas quoted Picasso in a recent review of your book: " All art is a lie." Is your work a lie?

LL: This means to me don't be afraid to tell the truth even if you have to lie. 9 out of 10 people who have read Mississippi Poems believe they are autobiographical to the letter! That all these things happened. These are my stories but stories are one thing and a life is something else. I am baffled that people think you are a homeless woman, a grandmother of a soldier, etc... Sometimes you need to embellish--you need powerful imagery--to make the point in your poem.

DH: You make no bones about it--you have suffered from mental illness. Plath and Sexton did as well--and they sort of brought a romance to it. Do you find anything romantic about it?

LL: Do I find anything romantic about mental illness? Well, sure. When you are psychotic it is really good practice for constructing your own reality. In the midst of psychosis you really can't write coherently--but you can mine your experience after the fact. I don't write as well on medication. I can write better off it. But I can't function without medication.

But overall I don't think there is much romance attached to mental illness. And there is nothing romantic about killing yourself--like Plath and Sexton did.

DH: Can you talk a bit about your editorship of Spare Change News--the Boston area homeless newspaper?

LL: When I started with Spare Change I was writing pieces about homelessness, cocaine, etc... One day I went to the offices in Harvard Square to get some papers to sell when someone in the office said: "You are the new editor." I guess they liked my writing! I cracked up with laughter then, but they were serious. That was in 1997 and I worked there to 2002. I was glad to dedicate myself to something more than myself.

DH: In your collection Mississippi Poems you have an appreciation of the beauty of the state. Most of us think of its ugliness: its poverty, its civil rights history, etc... How do you explain your different take on this?

I was very fortunate that my aunts, uncles and cousins thought children were great creations. They thought they should be loved, cherished, and indeed I was loved there. When I was back North with my family I didn't feel as loved. So this is how I came to love Mississippi. When I was older I found out what was going on there--incredible injustice, violence-I didn't understand this when I was younger. Later I taught school there and wrote for two newspapers down South. I was in the middle of all this when I was a feature writer for the Jackson Reporter- an all black newspaper. I was the only white writer. My once loving family down there hated me for this.



**Linda Larson is currently working on a third collection and resides in Cambridge, Mass with her husband.


Buckethead

I

Buckethead

She moved into the other half of the duplex
I owned on the colored side as it was called then
Of Fortification Street-
Where Grant had broken through the Confederate lines
And turned Jackson, Mississippi,
Into Chimneyville.

With her she brought
All of two trash bags.
Her hair looked like the
Nest of a magpie
Done up in platinum blonde.
But she showed up alone,
And she was
Showing.
I couldn’t bring myself
To turn her away.

She kept to herself.
Got up in the morning,
Went somewhere,
Dressed neatly under that banshee hair-don’t.
Never brought groceries home.
Her car
Parked in the side lot
Was littered with soda cans and
Fast food wrappers.

She carried brown paper bags into the house
Clinking like liquor bottles.
Never brought any out.
One day she came over,
Knocked at my door,
Classifieds in hand.

A German shepherd?
A female spayed?
Would it be okay?

The poor pitiful thing.
What would a good shampooing and brushing do?
A trip to the beauty shop was what she needed,
A spot of lipstick,
Not a dog.

All alone she was,
Not even a pretend ring.
Her legs and arms stick thin,
I said yes…
She would have to keep it outside.

She brought the dog home
In early June
The sorriest looking dog I had ever seen.

She’s been on a chain her whole life
She apologized for the dog, now
Skulking low to the ground,
Head turned sideways,
Anticipating a blow…
She dragged it up the steps
She’ll be all right
I am going to call her Tess.

What was her name before?
She didn’t have one.
She was just chained up outside in their back yard.
They just wanted her gone.
I’ll tie her up in the yard.
She said obligingly.

It appears to me she’s done enough
Time at the end of a chain.
My tenant gave me a grateful smile before
Hauling the dog into her half of the duplex.

Moments later they reappeared,
Tess bravely adorned in red leash and collar,
Her mistress in a white sunhat pulled over
That hair’s nest, a great improvement.
But Tess didn’t know how to walk on a leash.
To walk her was hard, sweaty work for the girl.

On one of those walks, up towards
The white side of busy Fortification,
Stopping to buy a soda,
Or sitting on someone’s steps to cool off,
He must have spotted her
Taking a breather along West Fortification Street.

It was hot as Hades,
Almost the fourth of July,
Close enough so fireworks could be heard
Off and on in the neighborhood.
My main concern was keeping cool.
I turned the AC on in the bedroom
And put on my housecoat.
It was time for The Price Is Right.

And then I heard shots fired
Not cherry bombs,
Gun shots.
The shots were
Coming from my front door,
Then into the living room.
I am no fool.
I keep a loaded handgun in my nightstand,
My brother’s doing.

So I snatched up my gun and started shooting back.
The shooter hadn’t figured that the person,
The woman, who lived there would have a gun and
Be able to shoot back,
Defend herself.
Like the coward he was
He ran.

I got a good look at him.
He was white and wore a Bull Durham cap.
I knew right away he had miscalculated
Which side of the duplex she lived in.
Tess was moaning a low feral moan
Through the screen door.
Her mistress,
Whatever her name was,
Stood silent and completely still.
She knew she had to go.
Like a marionette
She headed to her car empty-handed,
Not even a toothbrush.

I went to my Bible and gave her
Four one hundred dollar bills and four twenties.
“Don’t worry about the damn dog;
I will take care of Tess.”
I cannot tell when white folks are pale or just white.
She looked gray.
Grabbed my hand and kissed it,
Held it to her cheek,
Started her car and took off.

When the rent was due
And she hadn’t contacted me,
I went inside for the first time.
It was neat and clean and empty.
She had been sleeping
On a pile of neatly folded blankets and clothes.

What I had heard clinking were pieces of pottery,
Not like any pottery I’d ever seen.
Glistening and strange,
More varieties than a body could dream up
Or want or wish for,
Some I could figure out a use for,
Some I couldn’t.

I started out with good intentions.
I would pick up some corn-husk tamales
On Farish Street and walk the dog at the same time.
There I was dragging Tess by her leash and of a sudden
I jerked her up to where I was standing.

I took the leash off.
Go on now, Tess.
Time to find another friend.
Tess wouldn’t budge,
Wouldn’t even look at me.
So I gave her a shove.
She still cowered beside me.
I kicked in her direction,
Raised my voice.
Still wouldn’t move.
I hollered at her and
Tried to hit her with my open hand.
Then with the leash.
Kicked at her again
And missed again.
Raised my hand to her
Off she ran.

II

Again it’s early summer time,
This time a scorcher.
I have plugged my fan in,
Set it outside to blow on me
As I sit on the porch.
Even so my scalp is wet with sweat.
I am still working nights,
Going to the same job.
Still not part of a couple,
Sitting and reading the Clarion Ledger,
Locally known as the Carrion Dredger.

On the front page,
A photo of a dog,
A shepherd with a plastic bucket over its head
Held by two
Police officers caught in the act
Of removing the bucket.

The cutline reads:

This dog nicknamed Bucket Head
By the children in this Jackson neighborhood
Has eluded capture for many months
Surviving only by the kindness of families
Who over the winter put out food for her.


---Linda Larson

Morning By Thomas Fitzgerald

Morning

By Thomas Fitzgerald

ISBN: 1-59924-807-7

Finishing Line Press

www.finishinglinepress.com

Georgetown, Kentucky

18 pages

$14.00



Reviewed by Dennis Daly



I remember Sister Therese Immaculata, one of the more enlightened Sisters of Charity at my school, explaining the tortures awaiting many of us in Purgatory. She described this state of being to our fourth grade class as a downscaled version of hell without too much fire, but with a lot of heat, loneliness, and a dreadful emptiness. On the upside, it was only temporary.

Poet Thomas Fitzgerald in his chapbook, Morning, recounts much the same sufferings as those detailed by that almost mythical nun of my long ago childhood. In Please Do Not Seize, Fitzgerald’s persona, like a moth caught in prison of glass and screen, becomes desperate in his need to escape his inner torments. He must keep his head about him if he is to survive. Even as he confronts the ghosts of his past, he admonishes himself to “wait” and “give it time.” This first poem sets the tone for his subsequent pieces.

In Child Bug, old flaws and new ghosts populate the poem that predicates addiction,



I feel like getting drunk tonight.

Looking at the crack on the top step,

the one that speaks every time I press it,

at the hole in the ceiling

from the time I raised my hands too high,



And,



Or that I saw an old friend perfectly dead

and breathing—

eyes moving across the world.



Waking, a poem, which follows the downward spiral of a lost human with what appears to be complete honesty, confronts abject despair,



that I would be drunk



again—but alive enough

to see a woman wipe tears



from her freckled chin. I should

have known she’d say, I think



its time that you be leaving…



At the heart of this chapbook is an impressive set of pieces entitled, The Institution Poems. Here pain is mulled, dignity put aside, and death considered. Still, in the end, there is a green ribbon of life affirmation threading through them all. In the first poem the institutionalized narrator avers,



I have the thought:

It is good

my heart is beating.



Life and reality is worth holding on to,



I grip the peach in my hand

feel the juices run over my fingers.



Getting through this ordeal is much like Odysseus, bound to the mast, struggling against the pull of the sirens. Only here the poet’s persona deals with the draw of death as a child would,



I remember autumn

on the school bus

with the other children.



I remember how we held

our breath while passing

by the graveyards so the dead

would not haunt us.



He withdraws from addiction and seeks the surface of a different experience, almost a new birth,



My own sweat sticks

To me, heart overthrown, deep breaths, recalibrate.



I attempt to rise

Fingers run through my wet hair.



The fields are wet

starched cotton.



There is a pretty funny, yet telling, metaphor in That Alcohol Thing. The third paragraph of this prose poem relates,



My great-grandfather had a friend who said if he died first he

would come back and tickle my great- grandfather’s feet at

night. My grandmother said after his friend died he wore

boots to bed for the rest of his life.



The poem, The Dark Water, Empty Again, ends with a very stark and well crafted image which touches on loneliness, addiction, and hope,



He walks past me without

hello and now I am truly alone.



The wind over my empty beer bottle

makes the sound of a ship headed home.



The Waiting Room is existential and quite sad. In this room doctors are mechanistic strangers, bureaucrats really,



Hour pass. Does anyone remember I’m here? Patients peer

through the locked windows to gawk at the new lunatic.

Doctors open the steel doors and pretend I do not exist.



Before redemption there must be penance and there is here,

… my mother crying. I remember that I

deserve this.



And also here in the poem, I Have To Sit On My Knees,



To no one, to everyone, to

the stranger on the street,

to the hawks, to the crows,

beer in hand I try

to say it out loud:

please forgive me.



Because There Is Light is the last poem in this collection and the most interesting. The images allude to religion and the saint who seems to be invoked is Saint Thomas—doubting Thomas. The poet desires to understand his vulnerability by reaching out to other good but flawed fellow travelers. He is wandering through the supermarket of life after the deli has closed. I’m thinking of Edward Hopper’s Nightlife perhaps, or even Van Gogh’s Night Café, for their after hour atmosphere. The poem ends this way,



And I wander still, aimless

from Frozen Dinners to First Aid,

desperate to reach out

to the next person who passes by.

To touch the wound of his life.

To stand quietly together

in the checkout line.



Well done!

There’s Jews in Texas? Poems by Debra L. Winegarten

There’s Jews in Texas?
Poems by Debra L. Winegarten
Poetica Publishing Co.
Copyright © 2011 by Debra L. Winegarten
ISBN: 978-0-9836410-6-3
Softbound, 22 pages, $10

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

Debra Winegarten’s small, but packed book of poems was winner of the Poetica Magazine, Contemporary Jewish Writing 2011 Chapbook Contest, and with good reason. First, as the title would indicate, there is some humor in Ms. Winegarten’s poetry. And coming out of Texas one would expect to find some anti-Semitism as well and the author does not let the reader down, often combining humor and anti-Semitism appropriately in a manner that Jews and non-Jews can both appreciate.

For example, in “Second Grade, Part Two she tells it as it is – or was – or maybe still is:

A grown man stops me on the sidewalk
Eyeing my Star of David necklace and asking if I’m Jewish.

When I nod yes, (I’m not supposed to talk to strangers),
He tells me that’s really too bad for me,
Because didn’t I know that
Jews burn in Hell when they die?

Tears falling so hard I could barely see,
I dropped my weekly treasure and ran home
To Mom so fast I thought
I might keel over before I got to her
And be snatched right down to Hell.

When I told Mom what happened,
She put both hands on my shoulders,
Knelt to my height where she could look square in my eyes,
And in that Dallas drawl of hers, said,

“That’s okay, honey, don’t worry.
We’re Jewish.
We don’t believe in hell.”

It is my personal belief that this has happened to too many Jewish children. It happened to me when I was six or eight years old, but even more recently, in the 1990s I had some
evangelical something or other sitting next to me on flight to Dallas and when he saw I was reading a translation of Chaim Nachman Bialick he asked if I was Jewish. I ignored
him, but when he started preaching to me, I gave him one of looks and told him what I really thought and flew in blessed silence the last two and one-half hours.

Many of Ms. Winegarten’s poems stir perhaps forgotten memories of anti-Semitism, but
others reflect the fine sense of humor she has as in “Passing:”

Like the time at Emma Long Park
When a teenager was dragging
his distressed puppy into the water.

I marched right over and said,
“I’m a vet. Stop that right now.
You are doing serious damage to your dog.”

Wearing a bathing suit,
I couldn’t be expected to have my license
With me, so I passed.

Near the end of this poem the author is with a friend and two teenage boys are tormenting a kitten and the girl friend orders the them put the cat down.

“Who are you?” one acne-faced boy sneered.
Pulling out her gun, she pointed and said,
“I’m the fucking Cat Police. Put the cat down.”

They dropped the kitten and ran.


This book, short as it might be, is filled with sad and funny vignettes. But it also gives
insight into her upbringing, her childhood and, of course, views of Texan anti-Semitism which is not unique to Texas but which one could (and can) find in here in Boston and other cities in the U.S.

One may smile at some of the poems but they cut deep into the psyche. Ms. Winegarten
is a third generation Texas Jew whose growing up Jewish in Texas has brought forth some poetry worth the reading.

The Awful Rowing Toward Anne Sexton by Lawrence Kessenich

Lawrence Kessenich is one of the managing editors of the literary magazine Ibbetson Street. He is also a former editor at Houghton Mifflin and worked with Diana Hume George and Diane Wood Middlebrook on the Selected Poems of Anne Sexton as well as a subsequent biography. He was generous enough to send this essay about his experiences to the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene.







The Awful Rowing Toward Anne Sexton
by Lawrence Kessenich





From the first time I read one of her poems, I was in love with Anne Sexton. She was the poet I wanted to be. Her work was original, profound, self-deprecating, spiritual—and had a sense of humor to boot:



God loafs around heaven
without a shape
but He would like to smoke his cigar
or bite his fingernails…

…

He does not envy the soul much.
He is all soul
but he would like to house it in a body
and come down
and give it a bath
now and then.



. She played with words:



even its murders lined up like broken chairs

*

the skull with its brain like eels

*

they suck the childhood out of the berries

I was entranced by Sexton’s skill, her brutal honesty, her humor. And when it came time to consider graduate schools in creative writing, I dreamed of forsaking Milwaukee for cosmopolitan Boston, of sitting at her feet in a Boston University lounge to learn how she worked her magic.

I was on the verge of applying to graduate schools—including BU—one fall day when I went shopping at the local market. There I ran into a fellow student from one of my poetry classes, a few semesters before. She asked how I was going about choosing the creative writing programs I would apply to. I told her that I’d been advised to seek out programs where poets I respected were teaching. She asked who those poets were, and I told her. When I mentioned Anne Sexton, she interrupted, saying, “Oh, it’s too bad about her…”



At that point in my life, I wasn’t paying much attention to the news, so I had no idea what she was talking about. “What do you mean?” I asked. “Didn’t you hear?” she said. “Sexton committed suicide a couple weeks ago.”



I was stunned. The thought of that vital life having snuffed itself out was profoundly disturbing. Yes, there was darkness in her poetry, but the humor that often accompanied it had led me to believe that she had a firm grip on life, despite its contradictions. I was deeply saddened by the fact that not only would I never study with her, but I would never even see her read her poetry in person. The kicker was that I later learned Sexton had committed suicide on my birthday, October 4th.



Flash forward almost two decades. I am an editor at Houghton Mifflin—Anne Sexton’s publisher, as I am always proud to tell people. For years, I’ve read for Houghton Mifflin’s annual New Poetry Series—including Carolyn Forche’s first book—and my interest in poetry is known around the office. The editor-in-chief, Austin Olney, approaches me and asks if I’d like to work with two scholars, Diana Hume George and Diane Wood Middlebrook, who are putting together Selected Poems of Anne Sexton. Austin is a pretty reserved old Yankee, but I’m tempted to throw my arms around him and give him a hug.



I did not get to help select the Sexton poems that would go into the book—and, of course, having my own strong feelings about her poetry, I thought there were poems that should have been included and poems that could have been left out. But it was one of the great honors of my life to be the editor who guided the book through the publishing process at Houghton Mifflin—a book that is still in print, 24 years later.



Houghton Mifflin had also contracted with Middlebrook to write a biography of Sexton, and when the editor originally assigned to that book left, I was asked to take it over. For several years, I was Middlebrook’s sounding board at Houghton Mifflin, and I will never forget one call from her. After we exchanged pleasantries, she got to the reason for her call. “You’ll never guess what I have in a box under my desk,” she said. I told her I couldn’t imagine. “Tapes of Anne Sexton’s sessions with her therapist.” My reply was, “Well, you just guaranteed that the book will be controversial!” And indeed it was, though by the time it was published, I was no longer in the business.



I also met Sexton’s daughter Linda during my involvement with these two books, and got comfortable enough with her to tell her the story of my wanting to study with her mother—and of the coincidence of Sexton’s suicide occurring on my birthday. “Well, I’ve got an even more dramatic coincidence,” she replied. “My son was born on the anniversary of the day she died.”



So, despite my sadness over never getting to meet or study with Anne Sexton, I feel privileged to have played a small part in keeping her legacy alive. I believe she is one of our finest poets. Her work speaks to me as powerfully and eloquently today as it did more than three decades ago.

Poesy XXXIX

Poesy

Publisher/Editor: Brian Morrisey

Boston Editor: Doug Holder

Contributing Editor: Joe Pachinko

ISSN: 1541-8162

Review by Dennis Daly



Some covers tease. Some lure. Some enhance. The cover of Poesy XXXIX tests. A photograph of a grime-encrusted broken foam- cushioned chair with rolling arms, going to seed, the type often found in the darkened corners of factories, or homeless camps, offers the reader a choice. Either rest here, exchange funky molecules with the garish fabric, and be conveyed to places avant-garde, or pass it by to seek more sanitized, de-odorized, and perhaps academic, comfort.

If you decide to sit, you’ve passed the test and will match up fine with the artistic innards of this periodical. Now go to the back cover. Here you will find an extraordinary eulogy by A.D. Winans, entitled For Scott Wannberg. This jazzy piece offers a central metaphor with an attached simile like no other. Winans speaks of the dead poet as a butterfly in the way in which he lifted the spirits of those around him. So far, not that unusual.

Winans next explains that the way the butterfly lifts one’s spirits is “like a forklift.” That stopped me: a butterfly and a forklift? But, you know, it does work. I have not a little familiarity with forklifts and know the feel of the steady power lifting enormous weights skyward. That, together with the winged flitter of inspiration and delicateness suggested by a butterfly—well, damn if it doesn’t work. This same poem ends with a beautiful touch of wisdom,



Judge not a person by their supposed achievements

Judge that person like you would judge a song

Not by its words and melody

But by the way it lifts the spirit and the soul.



Inside the issue, the poem, Beyond the Bend by G. A. Scheinoha, takes your breath away. A poem’s creation is conjured up,



Swallowed up

first by the languid

stream of syllables,

broken only by

rock hard consonants

jutting up from

the white water churn

of thoughts…



The language is precise and wondrous

Another poem, One Thousand Abbie Hoffmans, recalls an earlier time of innocent hilarity and freedom. Whatever became of my copies of Revolution for the Hell of It and Steal This Book anyway? John Dorsey, the author, gets it right in his last four lines,



You knew mambo when you saw it



Knew dreams by the way

they kissed your skin

for a taste of freedom.



Tiny Photographs, a poem by Bruce McRae, oozes resistance and contrariness with these imagistic lines,



A monk burning

on a busy motorway



Or these,



A stop sign

with a bullethole in it



Or these,



A woman’s mouth

colored with smudged

black lipstick.



A Conversation with Sam Cornish by Doug Holder is not so much a conversation as a reflection on a meeting and conversation with Boston Poet Laureate Cornish. Holder, besides being an accomplished poet himself, is a terrific interviewer. He virtually erases himself from the piece, putting Cornish front and center. Holder uses a gritty Cornish poem, Dog Town Slim, dually for atmospherics and to prove a point—that Cornish is one tough street poet.

Two words not usually associated (at least in my mind) with a poet laureate are community and outreach. Holder tacks these words onto Cornish reinforcing his argument that Cornish, despite his formal title, is not one of the mandarins, the careerists of the poetic world. In fact Cornish marshals the advantages of his title in support of those “holy fools,” who write for the love of it. Holder’s admiration of Cornish couldn’t be more palpable.

Solid artwork in the form of photographs add to and punctuate this issue. My favorites are two window scenes by T. Kilgore Splake. One juxtaposes Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa’s subtle smile with a broad sculptured laughing face sitting on a window sill. The other portrays an older man, in silhouette, catching his breath, perhaps, in front of a lighted, seasonally decorated window.

I also liked very much the reprint of Scott Wannberg’s, The Rain Came Down Collect. Wannberg, before his death, was apparently a beloved supporter and friend of Poesy. A number of this issue’s poets dedicated their pieces to him.

In the poem itself Wannberg expresses his compassion for the hurt and broken people, who seek healing,



The doctor sits high up on a tree limb,

Searching through binoculars,

The healing will arrive soon, I hear

Don’t quite know which train will bring it.



What is also apparent is Wannberg’s belief in the curative powers of legitimate art,



Bring your wounded luggage,

Bring your passion and your hope.

Some things still mean,

Despite rhetoric, lies, and misdealt cards.



Of the many other interesting poems in this issue, one prose poem really struck me—Edgar Allen Poe by Ralph Malachowski. The interplay between Poe’s spun black magic and the reader/admirer is stunning. These two lines describe one heart’s connection with Poe’s vision,



Edgar Allen became a bas relief of grief appearing briefly before our besotted eyes.

Our occult groom will bloom in our heart’s greenhouse, watered by blasphemy, fed by doom.



Great issue!

Somerville Poet Amanda Torres: A Chicago Native Struts Her Stuff In Somerville

Somerville Poet Amanda Torres: A Chicago Native Struts Her Stuff In Somerville

By Doug Holder

Amanda Torres who is well-established as a writer, teacher, youth leader and poet in Chicago decided to leave the safe environs of her hometown to test the waters and her talents in Somerville, Mass. Torres, who is Mexican-American, came from the the wrong side of the tracks in Chicago, but thanks to writer Anna West and her Young Chicago Authors Program, she was able to pull herself up and out with the help of writing.

Torres said after her father's premature death she got involved with the wrong crowd, illicit activities, etc.. But one day during her shift as a server at the Chopin Theatre in Chicago, writer Anna West saw her writing in her journal, sat down with her, and asked her to join her program for young authors.

Since that significant moment Torres was intimately involved in the poetry scene in Chicago and beyond. Her travels brought her to London where she was part of a slam championship team--to statewide and national slam championships.

Torres first moved to Somerville a few years ago when her mentor Anna West came to these parts to study at Harvard. After West graduated Torres stayed behind. " I wanted to see if I could make it some other place rather than Chicago where everyone knows me. It is part of the growing process," she said.

And indeed Torres has succeeded. She lives in a historic home in East Somerville--the very last house on our famed Illumination Tour. She has worked as a teacher at Somerville's Books of Hope project, and now is a principal player in MASS L.E.A.P-- a program founded by Somerville resident and poet Jade Sylvan, as well as a program director for the Mass. Poetry Festival. This program is sort of a literary outreach for statewide youth.

Torres continues to teach poetry. She uses model poems from her favorite poets to get the creative juices flowing in her young charges. She believes being a teacher involves being honest and authentic. This builds lasting relationships with her students.

Torres reads her own work at the Lizard Lounge and the Cantab Lounge in Cambridge, and seems to be perfectly comfortable in our burg. She smiled and said: " I feel at home here."


My Name

My name does not fit me.
It is summer dresses and blue eyes.
I have always been,
will always be, cigarette burns
and back alley beer contests with my boys.
My eyes as brown and calloused as
my fathers hands.
My name means to be loved.
There are cracked bricks in my spine
where I was
beat
with a metal rod
my father flattened and dulled.
Sometimes,
when I cry,
drywall dust comes out
and I have to dry my eyes to keep from sneezing.
I have been loved
in the briefest of ways
by so many
I am more accustomed to loss
than to love.
My brown star boy
just found my dimples
with his fingertips.
He took a picture and that's how I knew my face
could be sweet.
I am learning softness
but I was not born into it.
because I know
I could kill
but loving
seems impossible.


--Amanda Torres

Review of IMAGES OF BEING, poetry by Diane Sahms-Guarnieri

Review of IMAGES OF BEING, poetry by Diane Sahms-Guarnieri, Stonegarden.net Publishing, www.stonegarden.net, California, 85 pages, 2011, $7.95

Review by Barbara Bialick, author of TIME LEAVES

To Diane Sahms-Guarnieri, images are an all-important way she remembers people from her childhood and on into motherhood. Sometimes the images are unremarkable and common in their humanity; at other times they grab the reader with the immediacy of her dream about her child drowning… The book is also populated with her father and other relatives who made their living in the Philadelphia textile mill era and ended up victims of such poisons as asbestos—from unprotected work sites.

The poem “Machines, Machines, Monstrous Machines” shows the “ticking hours…spent walking aisles of machines …spitting fiber into textile air, damaging lungs/already filled from a daily pack of Pall Mall/…It was audible, not thunderous:/an oxygen machine breathed with him/…a talking body on a long permanent leash/machines, machines, monstrous machines/from living room bed to front door…”

Her father was insulted during her youth by her mother for his alcoholism. He took the author as a child to a bar in the poem, “Another Shirley Temple”. “I watch him empty/glass after glass of beer/talking about work, work/in the mill all night, night/while I sleep weaving dreams”.

Her mother has her revenge in “Snowman” where “mom hoses your art away/melting the snowman liquid as milk/into the petrified garden.”

In the preface to the book, the author states that she is an “urban poet” who lives in
Philadelphia. “Each life is made up of images: images that are uniquely our own and images that merge into the lives of others. We are all an image of our own being in the collective human experience defined as life…” she explains.

Her dreams are equally compelling as her memories. In “Child of Dreams” she recounts, “a child: streaming hair like anemones lifting/oyster-white face slow motion sinking/like one of Titanic’s forgotten children/…I grope for dangling limbs, seaweed hair/then I appear among green hills/without her as I hear children’s laughter/…A wiseman
tells me the child is safe…”

Sahms-Guarnieri does not provide a bio, but does acknowledge that these poems have been published by such journals as Many Mountains Moving, Southern Ocean Review,
Wilderness House Literary Review, Philadelphia Stories Magazine and Anthology, Mad Poets Review, Mid-West Cultural Council, Fox Chase Review, Autumn Sky Poetry,
Limited Editions and Folio, “among others.”

Marc Zegans: A Creative Person Who Helps Creative People.

(Photo by Scott Erb)












Marc Zegans: A Creative Person Who Helps Creative People.

By Doug Holder

Every now and then I find it necessary to leave my beloved Somerville and go into the hinterlands of the Republic of Cambridge. But let's face it both cities trade precious body fluids so this is inevitable. So I found myself talking to Marc Zegans at Harvard Square's bustling Au Bon Pain Cafe one cold winter's afternoon.

Zegans is a man of many hats-literally--he is often see wearing a rakish fedora. He is also the Poet Laureate of Narragansett Beer, an accomplished poet/performer, and the founder of Creative Development, a consulting service that helps artists implement strategies to realize their goals.

Zegans is a Cambridge resident but he also admires Somerville. I told him Somerville is like Cambridge but without the jerks. Zegans smiled but offered no retort. He did say he likes Somerville's honesty--it seems more real here, he opined. Zegans can often be found at places like my beloved Sherman Cafe in Union Square as well as Bloc 11, and the Diesel Cafe in Davis--to name a few joints.

When Zegan's was in his early 40's he suffered a bout with cancer. He survived but realized it was time to follow his true path in life. Up to this time he had been involved in places like the Harvard School of Government as Director of the Innovations Program. He advised government organizations of how to innovate in a hostile environment. But he always had one hand in the arts-- over the years working in a writing and recording studio in San Francisco, managing an art space in Brooklyn and other venues. So he decided to use the skills he learned at his tony position at Harvard and start advising artists and artistic organizations to realize what is blocking them; what behavior is preventing them from realizing their full artistic journey, whatever that may be. Zegans works with them to build skills and has enjoyed success with a roster of local artists--one being Somerville's Shakespeare Project. Zegans wants his clients to market themselves well, but unlike a business he does not have them alter or lower their standards.

But of course Zegans is not only a consultant. Zegans describes himself in his own words: " I am a Spoken Word Performance Artist, and one of my major influences has been Tom Waits." Like Waits he writes poems about folks who are challenged by life. But unlike Waits: "I bring more of myself to the stage. Waits has said more than once that he is the character on stage not himself." Zegans incorporates Jazz, and the Blues in many of his performances. He counts Leon Redbone, the noted Blues vocalist as an influence as well. One of his recent performances was with poet Charles Coe, where they engaged in stagecraft for a public spectacle that dealt with mortality. A popular subject, indeed!

I told Zegans that I read somewhere that he rails against the Hipster mentality. He laughed. " I had a night at the Cantab Lounge in Cambridge titled: No Hipster Rock and Roll Revue--it was sort of tongue and cheek. But I do think hipsters today are the product of the mass media. They are told to wear the skinny tie, skinny jeans--the pierced noses, etc... The hipsters of the 1940's and 1950's were genuinely involved in opposition to the culture. They lived the life. They did not have corporate jobs in the day. They were devoted to their art," he said.

Like yours truly Zegans is Jewish so I asked him if there is any ethnic material is in his work. Zegans said his background doesn't play a big role in his work. But he wrote a piece about a walk he took with his grandfather when he was a boy. It was from Greenwich Village in NYC (Where the elderly gent lived) through the Lower East Side; a place many a Jewish immigrant cut his or her teeth in the New World.

Zegans appears like a man who has found his true path in life, and is a good example for others to follow their bliss.

To find out more about Zehgans go to: www.mycreativedevelopment.com --





A Hipster Retires



Do you remember the days when it meant something

to be a hipster? When sunglasses

worn over benzedrine eyes in nightclubs

in the subterranean precincts



Of the West Village, where thirty dollars

paid your rent, was not an ironic

quasi-historical, counter cultural

reference to post-vernacular

psedo-American sartorial



style, but a way to keep your fucking bloodshot

eyes safe from the scintilla of light

reflecting off the bell of Cannonball's

horn, so you could follow his solos



deep into the heart of a place no one

had ever been, and never again would see.

Do you remember when manifestos

written on Royals, white-out corrected



shared by hand, and read only by a few

could, by their dangerous sentiments

change in a moment the national discourse

rallying the voices of free love and free speech



and the possibility of moments

explored, consciousness expanded--the bomb

hanging above yellow and black fallout

markers--when to be hip meant to be brave



to be hip to the truth that power denies

to be knowing of the shadow pulsing

in the night of our American soul

to give birth to the cool and forget it



as soon as Miles turned his back on stage

because a change was gonna come

real soon, when to be hip was to be invested

with one's brothers in defiant meaning



knowing always, that our blood could be spilt

by nightsticks and fists and fruitless war

Do you remember those times as you wear

your too tight plaid shirts, drink your PBRs



sport your skinny jeans, ape trailer culture

in Disneyfied neo-bohemia

while you entwine yourself , unwitting

in neo-fascist social networks



a happy creative economy insider?

If you do, I applaud your ironic

self-awareness. As for me, I've no need

to be hip to the inside joke



my time is short, there's hearts to be won

the time has come for our hipster to retire.



Marc Zegans, October 20, 2011

Beyond the Great Abyss by Becca Chambers

Beyond the Great Abyss
Becca Chambers
Transformations
$18.00

Review by Renee Schwiesow

“Love and truth are the most powerful forces in the universe, and they reside in all of us as the embodiment of our eternal spirits, ready always to lead us to joy, true love and happiness.” In “Beyond the Great Abyss,” Becca Chambers takes us on a journey of her own personal transformation that includes three years of lessons in love and truth.

The cover to “Beyond the Great Abyss” may appear to be a woman shape shifting and, perhaps that is, after all, the correct way to look at the transformations. Half human and half owl, the woman on the front cover depicts the symbolism of the totem animal within. Owl medicine brings healing, clarity and wisdom. A feminine energy, the owl represents freedom, the moon and true seeking. Chambers recognizes that the journey she shares, condensed into a three year period of awakening, is a lifetime experience. In conjunction with an intuitive, an energy healer and other individuals placed in Chamber’s life for specific purpose, she was able to transform her physical dis-ease from the inside out. For many years, Chambers suffered from depression but through a commitment to her own psychospiritual health that led to her becoming a natural health healer, Chambers was able to alleviate her painful symptoms. Chambers holds a B.S. in Biology and a graduate degree in Naturopathy.

Through journal entries, Chambers shares her woes, her joys, her setbacks and her growth. Her ailing father is an ever-present intuitive support system for her while she struggles to understand the chaos of the other male relationships in her life and what they are mirroring back to her. There is no narrative in between journal entries. Therefore the book reads like a diary, allowing the reader to feel as if they have become a voyeur in Chambers life, but also with a feeling of wanting more cohesiveness at times, something to cushion the entries, like discs between the vertebrae that act as a shock absorber and help keep spinal movement supple.

What rings clear is Chamber’s love for her father despite her struggles with male figures in her life:

“Last Monday Dad hemorrhaged in his colon and nearly bled to death. Lots of transfusions and eventually he stopped bleeding. He had been on Coumadin, a blood thinner, because of a small stroke a year ago. Now the Coumadin nearly killed him – typical Western medicine. . .Now much of the time he doesn’t make sense. I’m the only one who understands him at all. I get right up close with my ear next to his mouth, and my mouth to his ear, and I can hear him and communicate. The others? They are so sure he isn’t there that they don’t try.”

Clearly Chambers is agitated throughout the book by her father’s downward spiraling, but also honored to be there for him and to listen to his intuitive guidance.

Chambers comments further on the owl from her cover toward the end of the book. After her long journey, she says that she recognized that the swiveling head of the owl is a metaphor for being able to see all sides of a person and also to view situations from all angles.

“The Great White Snowy Owl of the North has flown over my house and landed in the tall pine at the corner, where my yard meets the wood. . .I am the great White Snowy Owl now, with all the power and wisdom of its ancient and legendary symbolism. How I got there from the broken child I once was, and that grim and desolate place where I dwelled for so many years is the subject of this book.” Becca Chambers

Blue Collar Review: Journal of Progressive Working Class Literature

Blue Collar Review: Journal of Progressive Working Class Literature

Review by Prema Bangera

The landscape of a magnificently robust fist resurrecting above an ensemble of forlorn bodies with picket signs rising together awakens you and pulls you into the Summer 2011 issue of the Blue Collar Review. One of the picket signs on this front cover reads: You Say “Cut Back.” We Say Fight Back. You are in the presence of the working class as this journal celebrates their songs of every day.

This collection brings together poets from all around the regions of the United States and even from around the world. Gregg Shotwell from Grand Rapids, MI writes about the morphosis of an individual into a monotonous environment in “I Am The Rouge.” One can feel the mistreatment which has transformed a human into a warehouse:

I have become the assembly line
crawling like a centipede
through the concentration
of time clock rhythms
and pneumatic sighs…

I bow to the Madonna of Machinery
whose nipples are like grease fittings,
whose crankcase is a womb.
I am the fire in the foundry.
I am the pit.
I twist nuts, shoot screws,
and spit rivets like slang…

My blood is thicker than oil.
My saliva more toxic
than cutting fluid…

I am the Rouge.
I was here, Mr. Ford,
before you were born.
I will be here, Mr. Ford,
when you
are long time gone.

Here, we witness the paradox of a person broken and fallen on his knees while rising and voicing this injustice.

The effect on the individual always spreads into the greater mass. Philip Porter from Willoughby, Australia writes of the quite crackling of all laborers diffusing like disease in “Rubber Workers.” We see the slow progression of the inevitable exhaustion:

At 8 our street died every night.
rows of hibernating houses,
windows flickering the TV screens’ spul-like,
eerie-blue, monitoring the pulses…

At 11, our street shrugged
as bundled men like chrysalises
in overcoats slipped from their
council owned cocoons.

Tributaries of workers swelled
to flood. Some moved faster
as they woke, others
slowed to better hear a mate’s

remark. A shifting shoal of black-
winged moths drawn to the glow
of factory lights the clang, crash
bang of their industrial Jerusalem…

The journal ends with Al Markowitz from Norfolk, VA speaking of the cycle of life, its application to the hopeful change of this community in “Anticipating the Fall.” The tenderness of its movement flows throughout us:

Something is dying here
among the shuttered strip malls
and vacant houses lawns
reclaimed by wildflowers and ragweed
The smell of the earth burning not so far away…

Something is being born here
overdue but stirring
in the dense disillusionment
and desperation of the unemployed
and soon to be –

A rumbling in the distance
becoming louder
a storm gathering –
the yet fragile promise of
a new season.

Markowitz, the editor, brilliantly places this poem at the end to perhaps create anticipation for the next issue, which will surely be another good read. This poem acknowledges the current destruction of our society, but holds a sense of hope to fight for a better tomorrow.
Similar to these pieces, many of these poems invade your mind, break your heart and leave you wondering how strength carries us on—how this strength is seldom appreciated.

This journal is an assemblage of voices breaking concrete with talented poets such as J.E. Bennett, Kent Newkirk, Nick Norwood, Barbara Gregorich, David Sermersheim, Troy Bigelow, Thomas Lange, Michael Conner, Kate Dwiggins, Andrena Zawinski, Robert Petras, Chad Haskins, Kent Newkirk, DB Cox, Dominic Cuozzo, Debbie McIntyre, Charles S. Carr, Mary Franke, Cleo Fellers Kocol, P.B. Bremer, Ken Poyner, zdolores Guglielmo, R. Yurman, Sarah M. Lewis, Ed Weerstein, Margaret Sherman, Dillion Mullenix, and Jon Andersen. Each poem seeped into my skin and touched my soul for they speak the truth of our suffering.

On the back, Werner Herzog is quoted: “The poet must not avert his eyes. You must look directly at what is around you, even the ugly and…the decadent.” In the Blue Collar Review, we see the open eyes of artists painting the ugly and the decadent. Each poem unfolds to reveal how this ugliness becomes beautiful as we enter their hearts, their minds, cradling in the soot of their every day.

********* Prema Bangera, a native of India, moved to Massachusetts in 1994. As an avid explorer, she has lived in Bombay, Prague, Boston, Erie, Seattle and visited many other cities. She was named poet of the month by Boston Girl Guide. Her work has been published in Quick Fiction and forthcoming in Ibbetson Street. She is also pursuing the realms of theater and visual arts.

The Accidental Navigator :New and Selected Poems and a Story by Henry Denander

The Accidental Navigator
New and Selected Poems and a Story
Henry Denander
Lummox Press 2011
ISBN 978-929878-88-8
$15.00

The Poems in, The Accidental Navigator, are conversations with
the reader and each verse suggests a complete understanding as to
the nature of silence in people, place and objects. Denander
speaks to us with a quiet voice that only someone who lives with
himself, can write. We are attached to every word because the poems
are ours. They are a universal plea, greeting, peaceful humor that makes
for serenity and Denander is a master at making the reader comfortable
with all that life offers and takes and causes:

“i have read quite a few poems by
this American poet, I like them all
and especially the way he ends
his narrative poems without a tag
and an obvious ending.
Everything's just hanging in the air
for you to catch.

I will try to do the same and close one of
my prose poems without
my usual tag line.

Maybe in my next poem.”

The tag lines are full of laughter and we catch the irony or the astute
observations:

“while changing planes in Vienna
I took my son to the Men's room
and he asked me about the condom
dispenser on the wall.

“i don't know, maybe it's soap or
something,” I said.

I didn't feel the time and the place
was right for going through these
matters with my eight year old son.

“No, it's not soap,” he said, “and it
says LOVE on them.”

We had to rush to the plane and he
dropped his investigation.

Soon I will have to explain these
matters for him, though.

But if he knows about LOVE
already, maybe it will be easy to
explain the rest.”

The book is a compilation of new poems, with a smidgen of older poems,
and the short story is all that the poems are and more:

“The next morning I am early for my meeting with Despina
Aspro. The sun isn't hot yet and there is a nice breeze. I see her
coming from the far end of the port, heading straight at me in
her bare feet on the old stones. She is a beautiful Greek woman,
maybe in her early twenties, with long dark hair and beautiful
clear blue eyes. She moves like she is completely unaware of
her looks, unconscious of how the thin cotton dress shows her
beautiful young body...”

What a delight; reading this book is a pleasure, it is a walk at low tide,
finding clear pebbles, the rush of tide, the blue sky, children playing;
people meander along the shore, enjoying the day. It is Sunday after
church, or after a large family breakfast, or an early nap on a lounge
chair. What a relief; a book I can love.

“She kisses me on both cheeks in the typical Greek way when we
introduce ourselves. She looks like a Greek Princess. I wonder how
she could have known it was me?”


Irene Koronas
Poetry Editor:
Wilderness Literary Review
Reviewer:

Somerville Bagel Bard Kathleen Spivack in the News....

Kathleen Spivack recently won the New Guard Award for Poetry, ( Judged by Charles Simic,) and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her novella won the Carpe Articulum prose award. Kathleen’s “Lowell et al “ memoir is coming out in the fall. Kathleen is taking clients again after the end of January, and will be teaching in Cambridge and in Paris at the Writing Conference in late June.

SOMERVILLE WRITER JOE TORRA: A Man who gives it to you straight--with no chaser.

SOMERVILLE WRITER JOE TORRA: A Man who gives it to you straight--with no chaser.

By Doug Holder

" I think poets and artists often take themselves too seriously. I mean everybody is important in some way. Hey--my plumber is more important to me than most poets at any given time. When my pipes are clogged--and I got to go...who am I gonna call? We all have our god given talents..." --Joe Torra

I have always admired Joe Torra, a neighbor of mine in Somerville Mass. He is a self-described "working class" poet, and he is one of the least affected,and talented writers I know. He shoots from the hip, and at times makes you feel like your fly is down. And it's good for you- keeps you honest. Years ago he started his own small press, worked on his critically praised poetry and fiction while making a living as a waiter and a substitute teacher, as well as being a mentor for many an upcoming poet and writer.

For the past 9 years he has taught Creative Writing at U/MASS Boston. I have reviewed and thoroughly enjoyed many of Torra's books and poetry collections, and I have had an opportunity to interview him in the past. Torra has a new trilogy of his novels coming out as well as a new poetry collection. So while there was a break from my teaching duties I decided to meet with him at the Bloc 11 Cafe on a decidedly cold winter's morning.

Doug Holder: You grew up in Medford, and have lived in Somerville for a long time. Medford and Somerville are right next to each other but there is a decidedly different sensibility to each of these towns.

Joe Torra: We have lived here for 30 years. Somerville wasn't the "Paris of New England" 30 years ago. It was called--pardon the expression "Slummerville." Things started to change in the 1990's when Rent Control ended in Cambridge and all these artists moved in for cheaper rent. There were very few small presses and artists here before this. But I do think we take our self much to seriously as an artsy community now. We think we are "so special." It is a turn off to me. But this happens with gentrification--the old timers are pushed out, the artists come in and eventually they are pushed out. I think we are more the "Brooklyn of New England" than the "Paris." (Laugh)

Doug Holder: In some ways our lives parallel each other. We both have had or have small presses. Yours was named "lift." You worked as a waiter, and I worked as a mental health worker, and when we both hit our 50's we started teaching college. Would you say we went through the writing school of hard knocks?

Joe Torra: I call what we did living life. It was a great experience being a waiter, and it gave me time to write. Any life the artist has is the right life--rich or poor- who cares? What I didn't like about being a waiter was that people couldn't believe you were a good writer if your worked in a restaurant. I left this work when I turned 50--it was hard on the body-and I was getting tired. You can burn out on anything if you do it long enough.

Doug Holder: Tell me about your "My Ground Trilogy" that is coming out this spring. It is compilation of three novels you wrote " Gas Station," "Tony Luongo," and "My Ground."

Joe Torra: Yes--they are loosely connected at best. The only one that was published in the States was "Gas Station." The other books were published by Gollancz in England. PFP Publishing is publishing the trilogy. Much of the work is informed by Somerville. "Tony Luongo" is about a Somerville born and bred salesman. In "My Ground" the city is called Winter Hill- a section of Somerville. I couldn't have written these books without living here.

Doug Holder: You are also connected to Bill Corbett's Pressed Wafer Press.

Joe Torra: I am a founding member of Pressed Wafer-it was started by Bill Corbett. It was named after a book by John Wieners. In 1999 Bill approached me about working with the Press and I was looking to publish poets, their chapbooks, etc...

Speaking of Wieners--I think he was overlooked. Robert Lowell was known as the "mad genius" because of his patrician background. Wieners was a working class guy; so he was just known as plain crazy. Very much a class thing.

Doug Holder: You adopted two children from China. You have written about your experiences there. What attracts you to this country?

Joe Torra: The longevity of the civilization--the philosophy-( Daoism in particular), the poets Li Po, and Tu Fu to name just a couple.

Doug Holder: How has teaching at U/Mass been for you?

Joe Torra: I like it. I love the students. When we share excitement with writing that is a great thing. You have to make sure you make time for your own writing. I am older now so I am not quite as prolific as I was years ago--I used to churn books out!

Doug Holder: Getting back to your years as a waiter. Would you say restaurants were a sort of way-station for creative people?

Joe Torra: It was for me. I always worked with interesting people. People who were out in the world. I met so many painters, musicians, and writers. I met people who walked across Europe, etc.. I mean when the help had their meal before the shift the conversation was about what book they read, what concert they went to--what were they writing, etc... Sixty to 70% of folks who worked there were in the arts. A nice place to be.




""Who would ever have thought we'd see a black president? I remember as a boy watching riots on television. Police chasing black protesters with dogs. Power hoses dispersing crowds of black people. My father said that Martin Luther King was only good for starting riots then running away. Where did those white people go? The ones who were burning crosses, and bombing churches, and killing young black men? Many of them are probably still here, collecting social security now. And their children live on." (From Torra's novel " What's So Funny?)

*** For more info about Torra go to joetorra.com

This Time by Robert Gibbons

This Time

By Robert Gibbons

ISBN: 0-9824263-3-X

Nine Point Publishing

Bridgton, Maine

Ninepointpublishing.com

216 pages

$29.95



Reviewed by Dennis Daly



As I read through Robert Gibbons’ lengthy book of prose poems, This Time, I felt transported from page to page, not in the usual bookish way, but architecturally. The poems have the feel of lived-in rooms, each decorative item and essential furnishing intimately connected to its neighboring artifact in some sensory or psychological way.

There is an old story told about Simonides, the ancient Greek poet and verse innovator. While attending a drunken party with friends, relatives and a multitude of invited guests, he had to leave for a moment. After he had exited the party, a freak storm hit the building and demolished it. By the time the victims had been uncovered their bodies were unrecognizable even to family members. Simonides, however, identified them all. They had been forever ordered in his poetic memory and all that was left for him to do was recite.

Gibbons is the Simonides of the prose poem. He has revolutionized the form and made it into something new and wonderful. His poetics populate the kitchens, the dens, the bedrooms, the halls, and the balconies of a grand internal palace, a palace haunted by poltergeists and other phenomena, both real and fictive.

Once inside his palace, Gibbons’ mind works fast. Some of his pieces are densely packed, some would argue over packed with detail. In fact in his first short poem, Silence’s Desire, he seems to be admonishing himself,



There is that silence which has at its sole desire language, music,

primal cry! There is that silence whose immensity rests upon Soul’s

desire, language, music, primal cry! Quiet down now.



In Vortex of Inclusion, Gibbons’ art leaps from Debussy’s La Mer to the local waterfront, which seems to give him worldwide connections, to a Mallarmè letter,



… Mallarmè writes in 1885 that the present is an

“interregnum,” an obsolescence with which the poet has no business

getting involved. Advises writing “mysteriously,” thinking only of

the future, or no Time at all.



Dreams proliferate in Gibbons’ poems. Since dreams do not conform to the rules of traditional time, they fit right into the design features. The Geography of Dreams ends this way,



… Hurried from my station at

the circulation desk to write down the dream of waves in the bay in

Zihuatanejo, standing on top of the world in Boston, brushing past

Death with an “Excuse me,” & all the geography enclosed in the atlas,

when suddenly my father came by asking if he could cook supper for

me, peering over my shoulder interested in what I’d already written

down.



A good number of poems at the heart of the book are meditations on Goya or paintings by Goya. Especially interesting in this dream context is a piece called Goya’s Etching, Murio La Verdad (Truth Has Died). The poem leads into narrative explanation of the book’s cover with this,



Unusual, insistent dream, consisting of words alone: the image

of black letters falling down against white space, as if vortex, or

river, & led, strange as it seems, by the Spanish word obra, or work.

Uncanny…



Perhaps “uncanny.” But I think not so much in these poems, where images, numbers, and names collide in a timeless museum of movement.

This Goya theme is beautifully alluded to by the book’s gorgeous cover. Referring, of course to Ernest Hemingway the narrator comments with rising pleasure in Goya’s Passionate Introduction,



… I never bothered with Death in the Afternoon, until now. He refers

to Goya by page 3. Makes the art and knowledge of drinking wine

analogous to the art & knowledge of bullfighting by page 10. Goya

wine & the printed word, what more, (other than friend or woman), can

a man want at this stage?



Goya’s use of the moment coincides with Gibbons concept of no time. The poem Time = Goya explains:



Time went nowhere away from Goya at the hora de la verdad, or

moment of Truth, when Death enters the ring for the kill. For Goya

used to such ajustarse, or close infighting, & having fully encompassed

it, Time remained right there in his heart, eyes, and hands. Whereas,

even today, time embodies Goya; Time frees Goya; Time is Goya.



In Salem Came Back To Me Before I Came Back To Salem Gibbons deals with the non- chronology of his home town. Again he seems to be reciting or interpreting this interior architecture. These intimate and memorized details come to him not in a dream but in the next best thing, an insomniac’s trance. He says,



… during a brutal two hour bout with insomnia images

arrived, not chronologically, but a montage of streets and workplaces,

people and events, transient & permanent. I’ll document it as between

1:45-3:45 a.m.



Notice that Gibbons is straining to reconcile his artistic vision with reality and often they don’t correspond exactly; nor should they. Further on in the poem the same thing happens,



… working at Met-Com on Derby, the library on Lafayette,

or cataloguing the broadside collection at the museum on Essex. I

can’t reorder their non-chronological sequence, but driving down

Boston Street one might see, as I did again, those neighborhood

toughs Tarqui, or Pelletier, while Snowy and his crew emerged from

the woodwork of the Willows’ neon arcades.



Doors and Windows, a poem toward the end of the book uses internal language to convey poetic constructs of understanding,



.. Earlier this week I saw a storm

door standing vertical-upright leaning against two wooden horses,

ready for planning and shellac, the three small glass windows reminding

me of the one I carted in from the back parking lot of the apartment

building off of Porter Square in Cambridge



Storm doors or not, the entrances into these magnificent palace rooms invite all in to view the poet’s timeless creations.



I’ve seen most of Robert Gibbons’ other books. They are studied and delightful. However this book goes well beyond his other accomplishments. It is his master work, his mature opus not to be missed.

Ibbetson Street Press/Endicott College: An Affiliation. A Literary Community.

Ibbetson Street Press/Endicott College: An Affiliation. A Literary Community.

By Doug Holder


I have always been a proponent of a literary community to nurture young writers. Many a graduate of MFA programs have told me that the most important part of their experience was the community they were involved in for a couple of years. The chance to be with folks of their ilk and sensibility in a creative environment was at the top of their list. So I had this in mind when the affiliation between Endicott College and the Ibbetson Street Press of Somerville, Mass. was formed in Sept. 2010. The mission of the affiliation as we see it is to connect students with the greater Boston area literary scene, involve them in writing book reviews, interviews, and poetry, as well as literary activism--to make them solid literary citizens.

Since the affiliation has started at Endicott we have begun a Visiting Author Series that has connected students with prominent literary figures in the community. Boston Poet Laureate Sam Cornish, Vivian Shipley ( Editor of the Connecticut Review),Gary Metras ( Founder of the Adastra Press), Mark Pawlak ( Hanging Loose Press), Luke Salisbury, (The Answer is Baseball) poets Miriam Levine, Bert Stern,(Steerage) and Tom Daley have appeared. Upcoming features include: De Witt Henry (Founder of Ploughshares Magazine) and performance artist Michael Mack. We have also had writers in the classroom like Timothy Gager, Gloria Mindock, Jennifer Jean, Zvi A. Sesling, Steve Glines, Li Min Mo, January O'Neil and Paul Steven Stone. Students have and will be given the opportunity to network with these people and in some cases interview them (The Endicott Observer has on a number of occasions) as well as explore internship opportunities.

Students have also been involved with the Ibbetson Street magazine as well. Katie Clarke, an English major, interviewed Pulitzer Prize winning poet Maxine Kumin for one issue, and we plan to have another student interview acclaimed poet Marge Piercy for the June 2012 issue.

An offshoot of the Ibbetson Street Press is a well-known literary blog the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene. Here poetry, fiction and prose works from the large world of the small press are reviewed. English majors have reviewed books by such authors as Tom Perrotta, Lois Ames ( Who wrote the Notes to Plath's Bell Jar), and other poets and writers. These reviews are read by a significant swath of the literary community.

It is important for students to see their work in print. I am a columnist and Arts Editor for The Somerville News, as well as the Book Review Editor for the Wilderness House Literary Review. In that capacity I have published high quality poetry, prose, and reviews from Endicott students. I have worked with students to make sure their pieces are ready to be published. I have also published poetry by faculty as well, which includes a number of accomplished poets such as Dan Sklar, Margaret Young, Deborah Finkelstein, and Abigail Bottome to name a few. It is good for students to be aware there are a number practitioners of the art in their midst.

Ibbetson Street has long realized the importance of libraries for the "center to hold" in a literary community. For that reason I have worked with the Halle library, its director Brian Courtemanche, as well as the Dean of Humanities Mark Herlihy,and Professor Dan Sklar ( Both of whom are instrumental in all aspects of the affiliation) to create a small press collection in the tradition of the University of Buffalo, Brown University, and the University of Wisconsin/Madison. We have received a large number of books from regional, national, and even international authors that are being entered into the catalog as we speak.

Another component that the affiliation offers are internship opportunities. Students have been introduced to people affiliated with the famed Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Harvard Square, Hanging Loose Press ( U/Mass Boston), Mass. Poetry Festival, MassLeap, and other organizations and prominent writers in the vicinity.

Our hope through all of this is to create a vibrant literary community for students. We want a place where students will grow as writers, as well as explore tangible opportunities as working writers that they will use long after they leave the campus.